Former NSA chief predicts surveillance programs will expand

The former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years.

Former NSA chief Michael Hayden told television host Bob
Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend that the
current program that collects the metadata of millions of
American phone customers on a regular basis for the United States
government could in the future perhaps be used to soak up even
more statistics about US citizens.

In early June, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked
classified documents showing that the US government compels
telecommunication companies to hand over telephony metadata —
basic user records— for all customers on a routine basis. The intelligence community
claims it uses that information in order to track down suspected
terrorists by tracing their paths of communication, but Mr.
Hayden said over the weekend that in the future those statistics
could be queried for different reasons.

“But you got this metadata here,” Hayden told Schieffer.
“It's now queried under very, very narrow circumstances. If
the nation suffers an attack, there are other things you could do
with that metadata. There are other tools. So in that kind of an
emergency, perhaps, you would go to the court and say, ‘In
addition to these very limited queries we're now allowed to do,
we actually want to launch some complex algorithms against
it.’”

“That's the kind of argument that, frankly, even I could
accept you might want to have an advocate there,” added
Hayden, who also served as director of the Central Intelligence
Agency under President George W. Bush.

In that same sit-down, Mr. Hayden also suggested that President
Barack Obama’s recent plans to increase transparency with regards
to the administration’s use of NSA surveillance programs for
counterterrorism purposes could put the country in danger, and
decried the possibility of easing back on them.

"He also suggested that the oversight regime for this was
already quite good,” Hayden said of Pres. Obama. “He
pointed out that there have been no abuses under him or under his
predecessor. But he does have this issue of confidence, this
issue of transparency, so the president is trying to take some
steps to make the American people more comfortable about what
we're doing. That's going to be hard, because frankly some steps
to make Americans more comfortable will make Americans less
safe."

“[I]f you look at the commentary on this, folks from the
so-called left are a bit uneasy,” Hayden added. “They
don’t want a little more transparency with regard to the metadata
program — they want the program stopped.”

“I don’t think it will be,” he said.

Barely one month after the Guardian first published leaked NSA
documents attributed to Mr. Snowden, Reps. Justin Amash
(R-Michigan) John Conyers (D-Michigan) came a mere 12 votes short of having an amendment passed
that would have forced the agency to stop collecting metadata for
millions of Americans daily.

“Instead of taking a measure of defeat from what happened in
the Amash-Conyers amendment, you should be inspired by that,”
Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Technology for
Liberty Project told RT earlier this month at the DefCon security
conference, “because we came damn close to really putting a
dent in one of the most powerful organizations in the history of
the world: the US military and their surveillance program.”

Shortly after the Amash-Conyers amendment failed, Pres. Obama
announced on Friday that he’s advocating for
reforming the NSA’s surveillance programs.